Ghost Writer

Pat Barker’s haunted imagination.

Barker grew up surrounded by voluble women and silent, war-damaged men.Credit DAVID HUGHES

As a little girl, the novelist Pat Barker felt quite at home in the company of ghosts. She was taught to treat them politely. She grew up in a gritty industrial town in northeast England, in a family that practiced Spiritualism as their religion. She came across some of the family’s Sunday-school textbooks, years later. “Did you know that astral beings have no anus?” she said, when I met her in England this winter. She hooted with laughter. “That is one of the many useless facts that clutter up my mind!” Barker was born in 1943, a child of the Second World War, but her circumstances made her a survivor of the First World War as well. Her family had very little money. She was brought up in the home of her grandmother and her grandmother’s second husband, who had served in the battlefields of northern France and had been bayonetted in his side by a German soldier. He was also profoundly deaf, which made it hard to talk to him about anything. The child would stare at his scar as the man, stripped to the waist, stood washing himself at the kitchen sink; sometimes, like St. Thomas, she put her fingers in it. But how he came by the wound, like every other aspect of his horrific wartime experience, was never mentioned.

He was the forerunner: the first of all the silenced, traumatized, physically damaged veterans—living spectres—who would inspire the “Regeneration” trilogy, the masterpiece that Pat Barker was to produce in the nineteen-nineties. (It won her the Booker Prize, and an international reputation.) With her new book, “Life Class,” she puts the First World War at center stage again—especially as it affects a group of youthful artists, who are struggling to survive, resist, or represent it. Even her female-centered, social-realist early novels—“Union Street” (1982), “Blow Your House Down” (1984), and “Liza’s England” (1986)—had ghosts in them, of one sort or another. In “Liza’s England,” the title character’s husband was wounded in the throat in an action that killed most of his comrades. He has nightmare visions of their faces rising out of the earth, and, as a Spiritualist medium, devotes his energy to channelling their voices.

Spiritualism was popular with the British working classes after the First World War. “A lot of the impetus was this horrendous grief and denial that nearly a million dead in a country produce,” Barker said. She recalled that an uncle of hers lived in a house where a door would swing open for no apparent reason: “You had to say, ‘You’re welcome.’ ” All the family believed it was a poor woman who had gassed herself, walking across the room to the fireplace. “As metaphor—and similes are trivial, but metaphors go to the heart of what human beings are—there is absolutely nothing wrong with the idea of ghosts haunting the living,” Barker said. “It is simply a statement about our relation to the past, and to the parts of the past we haven’t managed to cope with. I thank the Lord I grew up in a setting like that.”

Barker lives in the ancient cathedral city of Durham, some thirty miles from her birthplace, in Thornaby-on-Tees. Her husband, David Barker, is a retired professor of biology and neuroanatomy at Durham University. (The couple have a grown son and daughter, both married, and three grandchildren. Their daughter, Anna, has just completed her second novel. “I wish she had chosen an easier profession,” her mother says.) When I went to Durham to meet Barker, the drive took me through starkly contrasting topography. First I crossed the moors, stretching away with eerie light on their midwinter khaki coloration, and with, here and there, the burial bumps of Bronze Age chieftains. Then I dropped down from the heights and through the industrial landscape around the mouth of the River Tees: the country that witnessed the birth and death of the Industrial Revolution. Even now—with the remaining chemical factories wrapped in pipe-work like their own intestines, the huge, sullenly puffing cooling towers, the perpetually flaming waste-gas chimneys against the backdrop of a cold gray sea—Teesside remains an exhilarating, though vaguely infernal, vista. But it is a postindustrial relic, a doomed shadow of the muscular, self-confident place where Pat Barker was born, at a time when factories and steel mills ran round the clock, and the Luftwaffe guided their bombs by the glow of the blast furnaces.

Barker is protective of her privacy, and has been known to complain about critics who seek a facile key to her art through biographical detail. We met by arrangement not in her home but in a featureless hotel in Durham. Anyone who has read her novels will be aware that Barker is an expert observer of two people talking, listening, or being together in a room in silence. The engine driving the “Regeneration” trilogy is the therapeutic encounters between Dr. William Rivers (a psychiatrist and anthropologist who really existed) and his patients—Army officers suffering from different forms of shell shock. His patients include the real antiwar poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who play secondary parts in the plot as it unfolds, leaving the starring role to a fictitious officer called Billy Prior. A “temporary gentleman,” with an aspirational working-class mother, he is a complex, amoral, seductive, and knowing antihero: a man defiant of boundaries of class or sex. Once he recovers from his mutism (he lost the power of speech around the time when he came to in a trench holding a dead man’s eyeball), he is by far the trickiest of Rivers’s patients. He challenges Rivers by drawing attention to the analyst’s stammer and suppressed childhood memories, and he calculates what Rivers wants to hear by observing the dilation of his pupils.

Barker, creator of this shape-shifter (“There’s a lot of Billy Prior in me,” she says), is surprisingly direct and candid in manner. In a way, she reminded me of the Northern women in her novels, chatting as they scrub floors, iron clothes, or sit knee to knee in factories making ammunition, boxing up sponge cakes, or plucking chickens. But her identity is far from simple. With her air of plain living and high thinking, her long, intelligent face devoid of makeup, and a rather provincial haircut, she looks like a Cambridge don or the wife of a Hampstead intellectual. Her speech is that of the educated middle class anywhere in England, except for traces of the lengthened vowels of her birthplace. Her tall, slightly gawky figure retains something of her adolescent self, as well.

Before she took up full-time writing, she was a teacher of young adults. She still misses working side by side with colleagues. “But I choose not to have a community of writers,” she said. From her relatively isolated vantage point, away from the London literary scene, she has staked her claim to a literary territory of ambitious range. She has published eleven novels covering more than a century of English history, from 1900 to the present. (She is a trained historian, who took her degree at the London School of Economics.) She defies categorization; she once said that she didn’t write historical novels, since for her the First World War was history that we had not “come to terms with.” Nevertheless, she is part of a generation of English writers that the writer and editor Ian Jack once described as creating a “literature of farewell,” fascinated by a “country and people that seemed to be there a minute ago, before we blinked and turned away.” However modest her childhood circumstances, Pat Barker grew up in a nation that was a great world power and then (like Teesside) experienced a dizzying decline.

With the exception of her student days, she has lived all her life in the Northeast. It was chance, she says, the result of having married someone who happened to work in Durham. But she admits that the rootedness has served her well in one way, at least. “If you want a broad spectrum of characters, some of them are not going to be speaking Standard English,” she says. “I am not very good at dialects other than the one I was brought up in.” A decade before she resurrected Rivers to heal the stuttering and silenced officers, Barker channelled an astonishingly lifelike world of working-class women who seemed never to stop talking.

It was the novelist Angela Carter, in a writing workshop that Barker took when she was in her thirties, who encouraged her to set aside her apprentice stories of polite and educated people and focus first on the earthy, tight-knit, sometimes brutal milieu where she had spent her girlhood. In the terraced houses with outdoor plumbing and coal fires, everyone heard through shared walls when a man came home from the pub and beat his wife. A woman had only to rattle the fireback with the poker to summon help from next door when her waters burst and her labor was starting. The children (“bairns” in the North Country tongue) were born and raised, as the dead were mourned, collectively.

Here is Liza, grieving for her son, killed in the Second World War:

Her body performed the familiar tasks, but her mind was lost in a white land. Fields of snow broken only by the footprints of small animals, animals that you never saw, but only heard or felt, pitter-pattering along, somewhere close behind.

When she could bear it no longer, she went out and walked up and down the street, head bowed, arms folded across her body. The neighbours let her alone, though they were always aware of her, pausing in their washing of bedroom windows or looking up from the front doorstep as she passed. Then somebody would go to fetch Mrs Dobbin and she would run out and put her arms round Liza and lead her back to the house. “Howay in, love,” she’d say. “Look, it’s gunna rain.”

From the outset, Barker demonstrated compassion and psychological insight, and a formidable literary technique. Her plots have elements of the murder mystery or the psychological thriller, with mercurial shifts of narrative viewpoint from one character to another and from a character’s interior monologue to godlike omniscience. She explores the consequences of violence, whether between nations or within the deceptive coziness of home. She is by turns bawdy, lyrical, and cinematic. She is not afraid of the gothic. “I am interested not just in right and wrong but in good and evil,” she says. “And in innocence and experience—an entirely different thing, but also fascinating.” With “Blow Your House Down,” she turned an unblinking eye on a community of working-class women who had resorted to prostitution and become the prey of a killer based on the real-life nineteen-seventies murderer known as the Yorkshire Ripper. Even in this Dostoyevskian roman noir of women on the edge—vulnerable on wet night streets, in boarded-up houses, and under railway arches—there are variants of class distinction. In “Union Street,” most people were poor, but some were clean and respectable, while others were rough or merely common.

“Class gets in, if you’re an English writer,” Barker said. “You almost can’t avoid it.” It hadn’t occurred to her, until some readers pointed it out, that “Life Class,” the title of her latest novel, might be seen as an allusion to the class system. But certainly she was interested in the Slade School of Fine Art (one of the book’s settings, along with the gruesome wards of a field hospital and a little Belgian town adjacent to the front), partly because in 1914 that famous institution was one of the few places in England where social classes mingled. “You had aristocratic girls like Lady Diana Manners, using it as part of their ‘finishing,’ and also very poor working-class Jewish boys from the East End, who were trying to do the whole thing on tiny scholarships and weren’t getting enough to eat,” she said. In Barker’s own life, the first cross-fertilizing encounter with a culture wider than her family’s came when she won a place at a local all-girls grammar school. Her grandmother tried to keep up with the books she brought home, until the homework was Latin or algebra and the gulf irreparably widened. Her step-grandfather could sign his name, but he couldn’t read. His illiteracy, like his war, was an unmentionable topic. He used to sit in his armchair pretending to read a newspaper.

Pat Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. “And with talkative women, spinning stories,” she said. “Stories with bits missing.” She is a true war baby. “My mother was in the Wrens”—the Women’s Royal Naval Service—“and her stories about World War Two were always quite intriguing. She used to run home through an air raid, because she knew her mother would be worried. It was a very dangerous thing to do, but I’m afraid that wouldn’t occur to my mother. She really adored the war. She was one of those women whose lives were expanded by the experience of it. She was on this huge mixed-service base, and there were lots and lots of young men. One of whom was my father! But her stories stopped short of revealing which one.”

To the end of her mother’s life, Barker never got to the bottom of it. She thinks now that her mother had no idea who he was.

“I would try to get her to speak about it, but she would just invent whatever she thought I wanted to hear. What happened was that she had fallen very deeply in love with a marine, who was travelling on a submarine—or a ship, I’m not sure which—that was blown up and sunk. The girls she was in a hut with persuaded her—to pull her out of it—to go out drinking, and she got absolutely plastered. There’s no doubt that what was in her mind was this man she had really loved, and who was still, to the end of her life, a significant figure. And the man she met that night and had sex with was an insignificant figure, except for the fact that she got lumbered with me.” There was a silence. “It’s almost like being begotten by a ghost,” she added.

When her mother died, eight years ago, Barker found a photograph of the marine hidden under the cloth on her mother’s dressing table. “I’m sure there were times when to console herself she persuaded herself that I was this man’s child. But I definitely wasn’t.” She has kept the photograph; it would mean nothing to anyone else in the family, but it means something to her. “The man who ought to have been my father.”

Her pregnant mother had to leave the Wrens and go back to live with her mother and stepfather, and the man with the bayonet wound was hardly eager to share his home with the young woman and her infant daughter.

“I was not allowed to cry, as a baby,” Barker said. “Not because they were stupidly fond of me, but because he would have raised the roof if he’d had a crying baby in the house. I was actually hidden in a cupboard once. My grandmother told me the story. My grandmother and my mother were so ashamed of this thing. When my step-grandfather’s relatives came round—they were posh, you see, several notches up the social ladder—I was actually hidden, asleep, put upstairs. My existence was not mentioned.”

She was fifteen when her step-grandfather died. “He was a very nice old man, really. He grew to love me. On his deathbed, he called for me continually. Didn’t want anybody else. I remember holding his hand. He wanted me to pull him up. He kept saying, ‘Pull! Pull!’ He’d had a very bad hemorrhage, but doctors didn’t respect patients then—didn’t tell you what was wrong, if you had cancer. He said, ‘It’s the bayonet wound, isn’t it?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ He ended his life thinking the bayonet wound he’d had as a young man had finally got him.”

When Barker was seven, her mother left home to marry a man who had also been in the First World War, dispatched to the front as a boy of fifteen. In later years, he had a paralyzing stammer and an uncontrollable temper. Barker stayed behind with her grandmother. Her mother’s new household included a son from her husband’s previous marriage, to a woman who had died when he was an infant. “My stepfather had a violent, explosive temper where that boy was concerned,” Barker said. “He would get him on the floor and kick him. My mother would try to intervene and get kicked herself. At fifteen, this tall, strong, but deranged boy was sent into the Army, which considerately trained him to kill and then sent him home again. He had a startlingly active criminal career. I remember going to two prisons with my mother—there were many more prisons, but there were two I went to with her—and these awful conversations would take place. My mother, who had a great sense of drama, would make pleas to him to go straight. They were each of them in a B movie. Which was, at the same time, sincere. She really tried very hard with that lad.”

Barker recalled having a varied life, going between the two households, but she stayed with her mother only for short periods. She was a witness to violence, but not its victim. “My grandmother would have asked questions if I’d come home with bruises,” she said.

Readers who have known only the war trilogy, with its historical sweep and its close examination of relationships between men (not excluding the homoerotic), may be surprised to learn that Pat Barker has written extensively and sympathetically about women and children. Barker seems compelled to shift focus, take risks, and evade formulaic expectations. It’s as if she were intent on denying readers the satisfaction of placing her too exactly.

After the first three books, written from an array of generally feminine viewpoints, she published a little jewel called “The Man Who Wasn’t There” (1989). It is written from the viewpoint of a twelve-year-old boy, fantasizing about his emerging manhood and yearning for an absent father. Part of the novel is an affectionate parody of a nineteen-fifties movie script. Something set Pat Barker free around this period. Perhaps it was writing from the viewpoint of a boy and then (with the great antiwar trilogy) from the viewpoint of such a range of different men. She said once that the male viewpoint was like asbestos gloves, which let her handle themes that might otherwise be too painful. After the trilogy, she took another leap, this time into present-day England: “Another World” (1998), “Border Crossing” (2001), and “Double Vision” (2003) evoke the traumas of the world in the recent past—September 11th, the funeral pyres of foot-and-mouth-afflicted livestock, the real-life abduction and murder of a toddler by ten-year-old boys. Danger always lurks, even when prosperous educated people are living in delightful village settings.

To balance the hovering, anatomically challenged astral beings, Barker never lets us forget that we all are part of the animal kingdom. Sweat, mucus, semen, urine, and—most of all—blood lap at her characters. Babies come swooshing into the world on floods of blood, young men in foreign fields and old men in their beds at home leave the world on wine-dark clots and rubycolored gurgles. Sex, for the most part, has been far from romantic: a predatory man violates a child with a penis like a “purple toadstool”; couples rut against the wall of alleys strewn with dog turds and used condoms; buttocks gleam in the shadows of public parks on hastily spread raincoats. Sex often ends in unwanted pregnancies. It is evidence of Barker’s confidence as a novelist, her tenacious pursuit of her identity and her moral truth, that she will revisit almost identical scenes from one book to the next, seeing them from a different angle or giving them a different outcome. A mother leads a teen-age daughter to a filthy old abortionist and they see things through to a ghastly conclusion; a mother takes her daughter to the abortionist, with her dirty fingernails and “stockings drooped round her ankles, like the folds of an elephant’s backside,” and then changes her mind, making way for the birth of a granddaughter who will be the love of her life. The decision comes to her, in the dingy pub where the trio have met, as a regenerative union between herself and nature:

This was as far as she could come and still remain herself, but her self seemed a small, weak creature, a skin to be sloughed off and left behind. Soil closed round, cool and dense, nourishing the roots of hair. Wind moved in her branches. Her fingers, resting on a beer mat, were twigs bursting into leaf. . . . “Howay, Eileen, we’re going home.”

All experience has tendrils, all relationships are multilayered: between men and women, children and other children, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, history and the present, the living and the dead. Human beings are mystics; human beings are brutes. Animals, in Barker, can pad onstage with telegrammed messages from the spirit world, for good or ill. If Liza’s husband, Frank, was a Spiritualist medium, speaking in the voices of dead soldiers, her parrot is a medium, too. She got this numinous, moth-eaten, foulmouthed old bird from a friend who got him from a sailor. The sailor abandoned the bird because it got on his nerves:

“He’d been kept in the mess, you know, and he used to imitate all the lads’ voices, and of course. . . . A lot of the lads were dead.”

Bloody hell, thought Liza, looking into the cage. It’s Frank.

“He used to say it reminded him of the mates he’d lost. He got so his nerves couldn’t stand it. But I used to say to him, that’s not right, you know. You have to remember. You owe it to people to remember.”

When, at last, in “Life Class,” Barker portrays attractive and heterosexual young people making love to each other in private in a warm bed, happily sharing the pleasures of the flesh with no fear of getting pregnant, the scenario is positively shocking. It is startling, too, at least in the first half of “Life Class,” to see our genteel reflection in the mirrors of the Café Royal, table-hopping with these same people, and hobnobbing with “Gus”—Augustus John, the painter. (Later chapters take us back to war, to the familiar hell of mud, blood, and gangrene.) Barker introduces a triangle of young people: Paul Tarrant, another hybrid from a working-class family on Teesside, but with a property-owning grandmother who left him some money; Kit Neville, brought up in an Edwardian world of cooks and nannies but with a painting style already evolved and more modern, by light-years, than those of his contemporaries; and Elinor Brooke, a girl from a family straight out of Forster or Saki, but committed to her integrity as an artist and her freedom as a woman. She resists any sort of glorification of war by those at home on the sidelines. War, she says, is “a single bullying voice shouting all the other voices down.” Lady Ottoline Morrell takes up the young woman, and invites her to her tea parties.

I told Barker how surprised I was to find her, of all people, here on the fringes of Bloomsbury.

“I’m going to stay on the fringes, I’ve decided!” she said, laughing. She talked about Elinor (who is based, in part, on Dora Carrington, and has echoes of Lily Briscoe in “To the Lighthouse”) in the same protective, maternal tone she had used about her daughter, Anna. “I was very tempted to introduce Virginia Woolf, simply because what Elinor feels about the war is very close to what Virginia Woolf says in ‘Three Guineas,’ but Elinor can’t articulate it. That’s infuriating. All you would need, to make it clear, is Virginia smoking a cigarette after dinner and Elinor sitting, as the Slade girls used to sit, more or less like ornaments on the mantelpiece, and thinking, Yes, that’s what I feel.”

Virginia Woolf was not invited into “Life Class,” largely because she trails too much of her own myth: “You can’t fictionalize a character who has already become fiction.” Barker is no Bloomsbury groupie (“Not in the least!”), but she is fond of Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Woolf’s nephew Julian Bell died young, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. “That summer after he died, she was walking across the Sussex Downs, having long, passionate disputes with him. He’d gone off and died in a war, in spite of his Bloomsbury inheritance, crippling and devastating his mother. The family went into both wars already grieving for a dead young man: Thoby”—Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s older brother—“before the First World War, and Julian before the Second World War. They almost pre-experience what’s going to come for others.”

She went on, “In the end, I think about war from a very feminine perspective. In all my books, there’s a great emphasis on the long-term damage to the individual and to the family. There are male carers, for veterans, but the overwhelming burden of caring for someone who will never be the same again falls on women. I’ve always been aware of the psychological damage inflicted on families, sometimes not clearing for several generations.” Many people have told her that “Regeneration” helped them understand broody and volatile fathers and grandfathers who had cast a shadow on their households.

I asked her whether she thought that everyone could be redeemed, whether damage to a family could be arrested.

“I think it can,” she said. “And I don’t think it necessarily requires professionals. It requires someone to do something very, very creative with the materials of everyday life. A lot of ordinary people are capable of that.”

Her own accomplishments have clearly required something more. “I’m quite determined,” she said. “Probably a bit driven. It’s silly, but I never knew what my father’s name was, and I never had the same name as the people I was living with until I married my husband. In a horrible sort of way, ‘making a name’ was perhaps more of a drive than it should have been.”

I asked her what she thought her mother and her grandmother had given her.

Her face lighted up. “Oh, I think a delight in language,” she said. “They each had that. The fun of telling stories. A great sense of humor. A sense of continuity—creating a home base in not very easy circumstances. And a great sense of biological meaning.” ♦